When I went to bed last night, I was weeping; when I woke up in the middle of the night, I was still weeping. And when I opened my eyes this morning, with my one year old son sleeping peacefully in between my wife and me, I was still weeping. And, trust me, I don't weep on a dime.
The tears running down my face were of something so much more than happiness, so much more than simple relief. They were an exhalation.
Obama's election on Tuesday allows us to breathe again. It allows us to envisage possibilities and dreams that came perilously close to being extinguished. It allows us to imagine a better, fairer world, for our children and then their children and grandchildren beyond them. It is, quite simply, a transformative event, one that takes us through a wormhole and into a new cultural space that, according to the regular laws of politics, we had no reason to believe we could reach in our lifetimes.
Over a century ago, my great-grandparents arrived at New York's Ellis Island, after a journey to a land far removed from the pogroms of Tsarist Russia. They would have stood on the decks of their boats and watched as the Statue of Liberty hove into view. Had they been able to read English, they would have seen Emma Lazarus's words hued into the base of Lady Liberty. "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to be free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." They would have stood up a little straighter and, in Yiddish, uttered words of wonder at the mighty New World awaiting them. When they became citizens, they voted -- first the men, then, when women were enfranchised, my great-grandmothers too -- that simple act of participating in who governed them marking them out as residents in a land of limitless possibility.
More here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sasha-abramsky/the-long-exhale_b_141646.html______________________________________________________________________________
What a beautiful essay, thank you Sasha Abramsky :)
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
